Hey hey hey!

The other night Ann and I happened to catch an episode of The Cosby Show. We see bits and pieces periodically, but I don't think I'd watched a full episode since it went off the air. It was quaintly nostalgic and quite funny, but what really struck me was how little actually happened in the episode. The entire plot was: Claire is feeling stressed by kids and work. Cliff makes reservations at a hotel owned by a patient, they put Denise in charge, they go to dinner, then hang out in their room and eventually, as Cliff puts it, "get it on." They come home the next day and are glad to see the kids. The end. Oh, and Theo takes a call from a patient looking for Cliff and refers her to the on-call doctor. That's literally all that happens in the episode. It wasn't bad -- far from it -- but I was taken by just how little plot was involved. On any other show in the world, particularly these days, Claire and Cliff's dinner would have been interrupted by a rude couple at the next table, or the food would have been undercooked, or a robbery would have broken out. Or they would have come home to find the house flooded and Rudy missing. Nope - stress, hotel for the night, home, done. There's your half hour. Even the intro felt simplistic... I think it must've been from the first season or so, because there was none of this smooth jazz while Bill does some soft-shoe skat or booming grandiose island rhythms. Just some grainy pictures of the cast having a picnic in the park while their pictures blur out of focus. Frankly, it looked like a Kodak cross-promotion or something. "Was your family picnic ruined by a camera that took nothing but blurry photographs? Y'see, you need to get yourself one of the Kodak cameras, see, with the zoom lenses and the fast shutter speed and the oooooh, and then you can have some Jello pudding pops."

The only other thing of note was the hilarious mid-'80s "what lengths will we go to to protect the children even though both on-screen characters are talking about 'getting it on'?" In this case, that would be "Cliff has changed out of his clothes into full-length pajamas, even though he's clearly intent on romancing his wife." If any of you have ever (successfully) staged a seduction wearing matching pajama pants and shirt, kindly let me know.